By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Published: May 3, 2013

HONG KONG — Even for China’s scandal-numbed diners, inured to endless outrages about food hazards, news that the lamb simmering in the pot may actually be rat tested new depths of disgust.

In an announcement intended to show that the government is serious about improving food safety, the Ministry of Public Security said on Thursday that the police had caught a gang of traders in eastern China who bought rat, fox and mink flesh and sold it as mutton. But that and other cases of meat smuggling, faking and adulteration featured in Chinese newspapers and Web sites on Friday were unlikely to instill confidence in consumers already queasy over many reports about meat, fruit and vegetables laden with disease, toxins, banned dyes and preservatives.

Sixty-three people were arrested and accused of “buying fox, mink and rat and other meat products that had not undergone inspection,” which they doused in gelatin, red pigment and nitrates, and sold as mutton in Shanghai and adjacent Jiangsu Province for about $1.6 million, according to the ministry’s statement. The report, posted on the Internet, did not explain how exactly the traders acquired the rats and other creatures.

“How many rats does it take to put together a sheep?” said one typically baffled and angry user of Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblog service that often acts as a forum for public venting. “Is it cheaper to raise rats than sheep?”

Residents of Shanghai recently endured the sight of thousands of dead hogs floating down a nearby river, apparently the dumped victims of disease in piggeries upstream.

The arrests were part of a nationwide operation since late January to “attack food safety crimes and defend the safety of the dining table,” the ministry said. The police arrested 904 people suspected of selling fake, diseased, toxic or adulterated meat, and broke up 1,721 illicit factories, workshops and shops. Yet the ministry acknowledged that diners still had reason to worry.

In food safety campaigns in past years, “some serious problems have been dealt with swiftly and vigorously, but for a variety of reasons, food safety crimes remain serious, and are displaying new circumstances and features,” an unnamed senior official said in the statement.

“For example, there is selling of meat injected with water and meat from animals dead from disease, as well as passing off relatively cheap types of meat as relatively expensive beef and mutton.”

China’s prime minister since March, Li Keqiang, has said that improving food safety is a priority — one of the main grievances of citizens that he has said his government will tackle.

But similar vows by his predecessor, Wen Jiabao, ran up against inadequate resources, buck-passing and muddle among rival agencies, and protectionism by local officials, Mao Shoulong, a professor of public policy at Renmin University in Beijing, said in an interview.

“The United States and Europe can’t eradicate these problems, either, but they are even more complicated in China,” said Professor Mao, who has studied food and pharmaceutical safety regulation.

“Chinese food production has become larger scale and more technological, but the problems emerging also involve using more sophisticated technology to beat regulators and cheat consumers,” he said. “The government’s efforts need to catch up with the scale and complexity of the problems.”

This time, at least, the government gave consumers a stomach-churning glimpse into problems in the meat industry.

The cases described included a company in Inner Mongolia, a northeast region of China, caught with 23 tons of fake beef jerky and unprocessed frozen meat adulterated with flavoring chemicals and swarming with bacteria. Six suspects in Guizhou Province, in southwest China, were caught with 8.8 tons of “toxic chicken feet” marinated in a hydrogen peroxide solution and adulterated with illegal additives. Chicken feet, steamed or boiled with spices, are a popular dish in parts of China.

The fraud sometimes had deadly results. In February, the police in Shaanxi Province in northwest China arrested a suspect accused of selling a lamb carcass so heavily laced with pesticide that one person died after eating the barbecued meat.

In another show of official efforts to stem public ire over menaces to food safety, China’s Supreme People’s Court, the country’s highest court, on Friday issued guidelines for sternly punishing related offenses, like taking “ditch” cooking oil that has been used and dumped in drains and processing it to be resold for cooking. Such problems “seriously affect social harmony and stability, and seriously harm the image of the party and government,” the court said in a statement issued by state-run media.

Public discontent about food safety has brought growing pressure on the Chinese Communist Party leadership, especially since 2008, when officials acknowledged that tens of thousands of children were at risk from kidney stones and other organ damage caused by milk powder adulterated with melamine, a chemical used to bamboozle protein tests. At least six infants died from illnesses attributed to the toxin, which sickened more than 300,000 children.

Many consumers have recently stopped buying chicken and duck out of worries about avian flu. Parents in many Chinese cities, including Beijing, have become increasingly alarmed by acrid pollution that doctors blame for increased respiratory illnesses.

“Food safety and environmental protection face the same problem that although regulatory capacity has expanded, there’s been no fundamental change for the better,” Professor Mao said. “The fact that the police have become involved shows how serious the problems still are.”

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